David Malouf - The Complete Stories

“Is this your grandfather who was in the Wehrmacht?” Hughie enquired.

Luke giggled. “No, you nut! They lost all their wars. My dad's father. The one who was in the AIF.”

Hughie, still hugging the carton of crisps, got up and went to the other side of the room.

“Listen Luke,” he said seriously, "I've been meaning to tell you. If you need any money I've got stacks of it.”

“What?”

“Money. Com'n look.”

He was standing over an open drawer.

“My dad's got this woman he goes to, and every time he goes off and leaves me alone I get ten dollars. I mean, he gives it to me. I'm making a fortune!” The two boys stood looking at the drawer full of bills. “He feels guilty, see? I ran into them once, up at the Junction, and they were both so embarrassed. She's a sort of barmaid. I had to stop myself from laughing. I feel like I'm living off her immoral earnings, ten dollars a time. If you want any of it, it's yours.”

Luke looked at the drawer and shook his head. “No,” he said, "I get pocket money, they give me pocket money. Anyway, all I need now is ninety-five cents for the train fare.”

“I dunno,” Hughie said before the open drawer. “Why does ‘e do it? What's ‘e scared of?” He looked sad standing there in the boardshorts, so buck-toothed and skinny, peering into the drawer full of bills. They had called him Casper at school. Casper the ghost.

“My parents,” Luke said, "are scared of all sorts of things.” And at first to take Hughie's mind off his problem, but soon out of a growing contempt and bitterness of his own, he began to list them. “They're scared one of us will go on drugs or join the Jesus freaks or the Hari Krishnas. Or grow up and marry a Catholic. My mother's scared of being poor, the way they were in Europe after the war. She's scared my father's dad'll get sick and have to come and live with us. She's scared of cancer. My dad's scared the tax people will catch up with him.” He turned away to the window, and Starlight was just moving down towards the point opposite. He could see his father amidships, in his captain's cap, directing: "There's only one captain on this boat,” he would be saying. “Most of all,” Luke said, "he's scared of my mother. He thinks he's not good enough for her.” At the prow was Michael, a lonely child, dangling his legs on either side of the bowsprit. Luke could see one dazzling white sneaker.

“Listen, I'll tell you what,” he said, "why don't we go out and fly the kites? We haven't done that for ages.”

“You really want to?”

“Yes, it's just what I want.” He hadn't thought of it till this moment but it was true. “It's what I came for.”

Last year when they had both seemed so much younger they had spent hours flying the kites, two big box-kites that Hughie's father had made with the same craftsman's skill he brought to his sailmaking. They were beautiful machines, and for a while Luke had liked nothing better than to be at the end of a string and to feel the gentle tugging of the birdlike creation that was three hundred feet up under the ceiling of cloud and gently afloat, or plunging in the breeze — feeling it as another freer self, almost angelic, and with a will of its own. No other activity he knew gave him such a clear sense of being both inside his own compact body and far outside it. You strained, you held on, the plunging was elsewhere.

Hughie was delighted to drag the kites out of the back room where they had been gathering dust for the past months and to check and re-wind the strings. He did it quickly but with great concentration.

He tied the sleeves of a light sweater round his waist and they were off.

Twenty minutes later the kites with their gaudy tails were sailing high over the rocky little park on the Point and far out over the water. Luke too had removed his shirt and was running over the grass, feeling the kite tug him skyward: tug, tug. He could feel the sky currents up there, the pure air in motion, feel its energy run all the way back along the string into his gorged hands. It took him to the limits of his young strength.

“This is great,” Hughie was shouting as if they had suddenly stepped back a year. “Feel that? Isn't it unreal?”

They let their animal selves loose and the great kites held and sustained them.

“What really shits me,” Luke said later when they had drawn the machines in, wound the strings, and were lying stretched in the shade, "is that no one has the guts to be what they pretend to be. You know what I mean? My father pretends to be a big businessman. He makes deals and talks big but it scares the hell out of him, and at the weekend he pretends to be the skipper of a boat. He gets all dressed up in his whites and does a lot of shouting but all the time he's terrified a storm'll blow up or he'll ram someone or that Michael will fall in and get drowned. People are all the same. You can see it. Scared you'll call their bluff. It makes me puke.”

Hughie looked puzzled. Luke worried him. Most of the time he was just like anyone, the way he was when they were flying the kites: then suddenly he'd speak out, and there was more anger in what he said than the words themselves could contain.

“So?” he said.

“So someone, sometime, has to go through with it.”

“How do you mean?”

Luke set his mouth and did not elaborate, and Hughie, out of loyalty to an old understanding between them, did not push for an answer.

They had known one another since they were five or six years old. It was, in terms of their short lives, a long friendship, but Hughie had begun to perceive lately, and it hurt him, that they might already have grown apart. There was in Luke something dark, uncompromising, fanatical, that scared him because it was so alien to his own nature. He was incapable of such savagery himself, and might be the shallower for it. His mind struggled to grasp the thing and it hurt.

“Listen Luke,” he began, then stopped and was defeated. There was no way of putting what he had seen into words. He swallowed, picked at his toe. Luke, hard-mouthed and with brows fiercely lowered, was staring dead ahead. “Hey, Luke,” he called across the narrow space between them, and knocked the other boy's shoulder, very lightly, with the heel of his hand.

“What?”

“I don't know, you seemed — far away.” He screwed his eyes up and looked out across the burnished water. The idea of distance saddened him.

“Thanks,” Luke said softly after a moment, and Hughie was relieved.

“For what?” he answered, but it wasn't a question.

They grinned, and it was as if things between them were clear again. Luke got up. “I'd better get going,” he said. “I'll give you a hand with the kites.”

Two hours later he was getting down at the empty northern station with its cyclone-wire fence strung on weathered uprights. The view beyond was of the sea.

He made his way along a tussocky path that led away from the main settlement, and along the edge of the dunes to where his grandfather's shack, grey fibro, stood in a fenceless allotment above rocks. There were banksias all leaning one way, shaped by the wind and rattling their dry, grey-black cones. It was a desolate place, not yet tamed or suburban: the dunes held together by long silvery grass, changing their contours almost daily under the wind; the sea-light harsh, almost brutal, stinging your eyes, blasting the whole world white with salt. Inland, to the west, great platforms of sandstone held rainwater in rusty pools and the wild bush-plants, spiky green now but when they were in flower a brilliant white, thrust clean through rock.

His grandfather was a fisherman. It was his grandfather who had led Luke to the sea, and his grandfather's war (or rather the Occupation Forces of the years afterwards) that had led him, through yarns quietly told and a collection of objects too deeply revered to be souvenirs— touchstones rather — to his consuming interest of this last couple of years. He had touched every one of those objects, and they had yielded their mystery. He had listened to his grandfather, read everything he could lay his hands on, and had, he thought, understood. He felt now for the key, on a hook by the water tank, and let himself in.